


Survival Class

by Missy



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Apocalypse, Community: apocalypsebang, Dark, Drama, Friends to Lovers, Multi, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 18:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts with a loose rumor and ends in a biological cataclysm that devastates Florida.  Or, how the Westen Gang lives through an apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Survival Class

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Apocalypsebang in '13. Thank you to Anna for beta, and Clex for the banner!!

_The first thing you need to know about surviving a zombie apocalypse is that no matter how many brainless drooling monsters try to swarm you, you will always be smarter than they are. They might be more violent than you are on the surface, but underneath they’re just lobotomized chunks of pineal gland with an endless appetite for red meat. No scarier than your average football player, and twice as easy to sack when you’re in a pinch. Always keep an incendiary device handy – I prefer flamethrowers, but a block of C4 will work in a pinch - and keep all of your limbs inside of your double reinforced war wagon, and you’ll do just fine._

*** 

_January_

It starts with loose rumors whispered at Carlitos. Someone had stumbled from the basement of an abandoned sugar plant used to illegally house migrant workers the night before. His eyes were milky and his mouth dripped a steady stream of blood – when he lunged at the off-duty policeman working guard duty, it took several shots to put down the attacker. The perp was in the morgue, the cop in the hospital suffering from bite wounds, the plant owner was in jail, and the building had been ‘accidentally’ burned to the ground. 

(Someone tells Sam that there were six other men down there – that they were being used for a semi-lucrative side business involving bum fights – but there are no bodies, no evidence of more than the single lurching, ill man).

Most of the locals assume it’s just a bad case of the flu, and that the drama will blow over in a few days, but the national media catches wind of the news and a flood of journeymen reporters converge on Miami in a matter of hours. Everyone’s tired, cranky and overheated; Michael’s somewhat glad for the preoccupation of the masses – no sentient person would pay more attention to a group of middle-aged ex paramilitary soldiers breaking into an office building when a possible zombie attack was the gossip of the day. It is an admitted novelty for Michael and his little family, because for the first time in years people aren’t asking about that flaming wreck on A-45 or the lingerie shop that exploded on West and Vine. 

He almost misses the attention. 

Almost.

By dawn the following morning, the pale, pustule-covered security guard attacks his attending physician, who winds up locked in a padded room while the world’s top forensic scientists convene on Miami General. 

For Michael and his ragtag family, those days lie far ahead. The first few hours will b about ignoring the possibility of a plague; the next few days are about fighting it.

***

_If you suspect that you might be in the middle of a zombie outbreak, the first thing you should do is get yourself and your loved ones to higher ground. Isolation is your best option, but when you’re in the middle of thickly populated area, you’re going to be fighting a rabid crowd that rivals any Black Friday sale. Hiding in your own home might not be possible, and if you make a break for the swamps you’ll soon be fighting off alligators and malaria. A high-rise at the heart of the city will give you all the safety of a well-stocked fortress and will keep you just as far away from the danger as an underground shelter. Zombies don’t magically develop skills they didn’t have before they died; they won’t learn how to steal a plane and no matter how hungry they are they won’t figure out how to make a forty foot sheer climb up the side of an office building. They don’t like bright lights, so be sure to have a generator and a steady supply of fuel handy – which will also be useful to cook your food and keep the hot water running when the rest of the city loses power. If you don’t have gas, cooking oil can be converted into a high-viscosity source of energy; your local Big Box store should have a ton of abandoned boxes in the back. Can’t lift them yourself? Loners won’t survive an apocalyptic situation. Keep a strong, healthy team at the ready. When it comes to self-defense, hand-to-hand combat will be useless – you don’t want to get that close to a zombie. Knives cause a mess when weakened carotid arteries can spew poison everywhere. Everything but long-range guns will be useless when it comes to defensive protection, and if you can’t manage a headshot then your cause will be instantly hopeless. If you’re afraid of turning into one of the shambling undead, your best bet would be getting cozy with your local arms dealer. Explosives are even better. But as Dorothy once said, a little fire for the scarecrow never hurt anything, and modern buildings have stairwells made of concrete with cinderblock firestack walls. A couple of incendiary devices rigged to go off whenever a certain amount of pressure is placed on them – and remembering where you laid them – will go a long way toward keeping you alive. The zombies will burn to a crispier secondary death against the firedoor, which will keep the fire from spreading into the building. Be sure to use their charred remains as bait for the rest of their zombie friends._

_By taking these simple steps, you should be able to survive any oncoming zombie attack. Just don’t forget to disable the elevators and you’ll be able to ride out this apocalypse in style._

*** 

_February_

Fiona has perched herself atop a cooling unit, still sporting her favorite red dress and a set of cheap plastic bracelets she nicked from a dollar store last week. She shoulders her scope rifle and checks the sites; they’re still clear. Michael watches her in the morning light, polishing his Sig-Sauer in the light of a battery operated lamp they’d seized from a ruined BJ’s Warehouse. They’re physically close, sitting at knees and elbows on a leather couch in their stolen, leather-padded fortress, a suite in an office building several miles north of the loft. It takes her a moment to feel his gaze, and when she turns toward him her expression radiates annoyance.

“What?” she asks.

Michael’s eyebrow bobs upward. “Nothing. You look beautiful.”

She rolls her eyes. “I just stamped a zombie dog to death with my good Pucci heels, Michael. I’m afraid I’m not in the mood.”

“That wasn’t a request,” he says. “I just wanted you to know you’re beautiful.”

Fiona turns toward the window, her hair smacking Michael just beneath his nose. “In case you never get the chance to say it again?” she asks dismissively. “You’ve told me that twice today.” She rattles through her handbag for an abandoned case of bullets. “Hush or you’ll give me a complex.”

He cracks a smile. “I just wanted you to hear the right words in case…”

She reaches out and places her index finger against his lips. “If you tell me that you love me you’ll jinx the two of us. And I don’t fancy dying as some monster’s dinner.”

“I’ve never known you to be superstitious,” Michael says, turning back toward his gun.

Fiona clicks her trigger, smirking as she wiggles the empty pistol in the air. “You haven’t seen my lucky coin.”

“The brass halfpenny you keep in your shoe?” Fiona’s jaw drops, but Michael only grins. “I’ve touched your shoes before, Fi. I even bugged them once back in Ireland.”

“Well,” Fiona coughs, regaining her composure. “I didn’t think you noticed what was inside. Not one for a foot fetish, are you?” 

“You know I love all of you,” Michael says, his expression utterly inscrutable. He’s teasing her – in his way – and he’d be damned if she understood that entirely.

Fiona stares at him, totally unforgiving in her posture. “You’re just having a laugh at my expense.”

“I’m trying to take your mind off the zombie holocaust.” Loading the Sig Sauer with armor-piercing bullets, Michael says, “it was the first thing I thought of.”

She cracks a smile. “Michael, why must you play Superman even in the middle of a total disaster?”

“There’s no one else alive to do it.” He puts down the loaded gun, snaking his arm around her shoulder, resting his chin atop her head. “I know this isn’t easy, Fi. The only thing I can do is make you a promise.” She stiffens in his grip, a sarcastic laugh bubbling up. “I won’t leave you this time,” he tries to convince her. 

“Or Sam, Jesse and your mother,” she replies, glancing downward as a cherry red Cadillac drives up in a hail of gunfire.

He slides his fingers down from her shoulder to cup her jaw, turning her face and those incredible eyes up toward him. “You’re my top priority, now and forever.” 

She smirks up at him confidently. “Getting worried I might walk out on you, Michael? I didn’t know you were the jealous type.”

Michael’s implacable expression refuses to change. “I’m sure you’re going to leave now, Fiona. Especially now that the ocean’s filled with zombie fish.”

She laughs, watching Sam and Jesse shoot their way into the office building, Madeline right beside them doing her fair share to make sure they didn’t get near the door. It’s a ten minute climb by foot, but once they made it inside – carefully stepping over the incendiary device placed between the frame and the flooring - they are intact, exhausted, and bearing enough food to last an entire army, carrying sacks of groceries and a very large box filled with something which sloshed liquid.

“How did it go?” Michael wonders, watching Sam and Jesse toss several ice chests onto the floor, and Fiona immediately gets to work pouring bags of ice into open coolers. 

“The Wal-Mart’s almost wiped out,” Sam says, tossing several large jugs of vegetable oil, still warm and freshly-siphoned, toward Michael. “I managed to make off with some hot dogs, enough steak to last us for a few weeks,” he hands them to Fiona. “These are from the food court –there are four more in the trunk, but these should last us a little longer than that.” Sam glances at Michael, trying to impart his words with as much meaning as he could without frightening Maddie. “In four weeks, we’re gonna have to make a run for it.”

“I’m prepared for that contingency, “Michael robotically announces, though the realization doesn’t color his expression.

Sam heaves an exhausted sigh. “C’mon, Mikey. The infrastructure’s starting to break down. I found one of my buddies hiding out in the stockroom, and he told me there’s no way we’re getting power back until they mop up this little mess. Who knows how long that might take? We can’t live for years on filtered water!”

Michael looks across the room at his mother. Madeline glowers as she flops onto the plush seat of the black leather chair occupying the majority of the rightmost wall. She automatically glares at him while smacking a cigarette from its cellophane wrapper. “I found four packs of Lucky Strikes,” she glares at them. “Do you know cheap these are? Why couldn’t they have looted a Target first?”

“Because the Target burned down on Friday,” Jesse says, mopping his sweaty face as he sacks out on the floor beside Fiona. They have finished stocking the cooler with perishables and are splitting a beer between them. 

“Good work.” Michael tilts his head, turning around to watch Jesse. “Did you bring enough?”

Jesse ticks the lip of his bottle against his wristwatch. “Twelve six-packs. They’re right here. And they did NOT come cheap.”

“Nothing does,” observes Michael, his voice dry as possible as he grabs a bottle of his own. “Thank you,” he says, turning back toward the open window, leaning partway into the humid afternoon air. Hoisting the Sig-Saur in his other hand, he began picking off any zombies who dared stumble close enough to their building. “I’ll consider that your half of the rent money,” he adds.

“..Remind me to charge you for the dent I put in the Caddy running over some creeps outside the liquor store, Mikey.” Sam says, as he plucks his own beer from the chilling brews.

“I don’t give hazard pay.”

“Money?” Fiona’s disdainful voice reaches him as she props her elbow against the cooler. “We’re in the middle of an apocalypse, boys, money means nothing.”

“It will when you see the front of that Caddy,” Sam whistles. “I’m telling ya, Mike, if Elsa lives through this…” He falters for a second, his eyes growing briefly misty before continuing on in his typical jocular tone, “she’s gonna kill me. Hey Jess, toss Mad one of those,” Sam demands, sitting down beside Michael’s mother with a sigh.

“So you’ve gotta have a plan, right?” Jesse asks, winging a beer toward Maddie. “We’re not gonna sit here for the rest of our lives, right?”

Sam cackles at the idea, watching Maddie pop open the tab on her beer. “That’d mean repopulating the world with Fi,” Sam said. “Trust me, brother, I’m not going there.” 

“Why on earth do you think I’d have children with either of you?” Fiona asks, making Jesse cough and Sam shrug.

“When in the middle of end times you do like the zombies don’t do, Fi. If that means cranking one out a couple of babies with you to save the planet, I’ll do it.”

“How chivalrous, Sam.” Her eyes roll back into her head.

“I try.” 

“Guys…” Michael cuts in.

“You wouldn’t survive an evening with me, anyway,” Fiona declares. 

“Would the two of you be quiet?” Michael shoots a zombie, enjoying the gooey splatter it makes on the sidewalk. “Extra noise excites them.”

“So crank up the lights.” Sam grumbles. “Sorry, Fi, arguing with you’s way too much fun.”

Fi gets up from the floor, reaching for a hand-soldered switch that blinked on a large set of hallogen lights mounted around the exterior of the building. This scares away an approaching group of zombies with a scream and a sizzle. “Grow up, Sam. Michael, do you see anyone alive out there?”

“Nobody,” he admits, resting against the window frame. 

“Sometimes I wonder if that’s how this will end,” Madeline says, as Sam wraps his arm around her shoulder. “It gets dark outside so fast. And then it’s so quiet.”

“It’s not over,” Sam reminds Maddie. “There are still plenty of people alive. We’re even getting radio transmissions from Miami central.”

“They’re locked up somewhere,” says Maddie. “With the governer – that lousy useless…” she composed herself. “So we aren’t alone. But is that better than knowing that there are people out there who need our help while we can’t get to them?”

Michael cringes. His mother had always pushed him to help others, had finally joined in his quest, and now she couldn’t help the people he’d promised to protect. “We’ll do what we can from here,” Michael says. “The more of those things we kill, the fewer the number of people who will end up becoming one of them.”

“It’s not enough,” Madeline says, sadness clouding her features. “There have to be people starving to death out there. If they run out of clean water...”

“But that hasn’t happened yet,” Jesses says. “Just keep thinking about the good, Maddie. We’re safe up here.”

But she stares at the half-crumpled pack of cigarettes in her hand and lets out a sigh. “I feel so greedy. And so guilty,” she admits. 

Silence fills the tense atmosphere. It has been just as long for the rest of them; though they are accustomed to sneaking around the dangerous, ruined Coconut Grove section of town during the daylight hours, the nighttime proves just as long as Maddie believes it to be, and it weighs on each of them like a millstone around their necks. Leave it to the oldest and wisest among them to save the day.

“We’v all seen people,” Sam says. “They’re still there, hiding, just like we are.”

“What did they look like?” Fiona wants to know. Michael, too, is drawn toward Sam like children looking for a comforting babysitter’s touch. 

Sam rests his beer on the leather-bound arm of the chair. His voice is thoughtful and a tad whimsical. “Yuppies with cell phones. Little kids in bright swimsuits, and old guys in cargo shorts combing the beach for scrap metal. Old ladies gossiping in lawn chairs, and college kids getting drunk under the pier.” Scenes from the last world he remembers unspools from his mind, their brilliant golden sheen simply the remantents of a better world. The last world he remembers, and one that had passed away a scant four weeks ago. 

They all go quiet again. “That’s not the way it is,” “Madeline says suddenly. “That’s not how I remember it at all.” 

Sam shrugs. “Yeah, but why spoil their hopes?”

She throws an overstuffed couch pillow at his head. “Don’t get up MY hopes like that!”

“Ow!” he whines, rubbing the side of his neck. “Geez, Mad!”

“Guys, don’t make me hide every blunt object in this suite,” Michael says. He moves away from the window and strides confidently toward the center of the room, making himself the central focus of their attention. “We’re staying here for two more weeks. After that, we need to move on to someplace with a ready supply of food. There should be plenty of abandoned farms upstate…”

Sam raises his hand. “I know a guy with a place. It’s a sweet little cabin, but it’s out in the ‘Fenoke swamps.”

“That’s our last resort,” Michael says. Visions of zombie alligators and fish still swim before his eyes at the very suggestion. 

“Is it worth the danger?” Maddie asks. She peels the label from her bottle of Michelob, fingers obviously itching for the comfort of a cigarette pressed between her fingers.

“If we run out of food, yes.”

“And then what are we to do, retire to a citrus grove?” Fiona sneers.

“They’re not as structurally safe as this place, but they have a ready supply of food, and we know how to booby trap them properly. We could raise chicken and grow wheat….” Fiona snorts again, Jesse outright laughs, and Sam and Maddie trade worried looks. This only hardens Michael’s resolve. “When this plague runs out of bodies the plants will keep living. Do you want to be here to take advantage of them, or do you want to be another victim?”

There is a room-wide pause of consideration. “Well,” Sam says, “I’ve got plenty of 4-H training. Guess I could probably help ya out, Mikey.”

“And any idiot could raise chickens,” Fiona says. “No offense, Sam.”

“I used to have a windowbox garden,” Maddie adds. “It can’t be different from growing vegetables in a field.”

Sam laughs. “You’ be surprised, sister. But I can teach you how to drive a tractor.”

“Good,” Michael observes. “Remember that when we’re using it to dig trenches in the back of somebody’s yard.”

“So that’s what it’s gonna come down to?” Jesse wonders. “We have to run around remembering what life is like in case we end up alone in the world?”

“We’re going to have to remember,” Michael says, “so our children will remember, and their children.” 

“I’ll leave that to the Betty Crockers of the world,” Fiona declares. 

Everyone shifts their jaundiced gazes toward her once again, but this time she abandons her post by the window and sits down, flicking them a smile and retrieving the latest (and likely last) issue of Cosmo from the coffee table. “Tossers. I suppose that Louis Vittoun’s rotting by now.” 

Michael just nods. “Dead and buried. We’re going to have to claw and scratch for our survival, guys. It’s not going to be pretty.”

Sam laughs. “Sister, when is it ever?”

“Stuck for the rest of my life with a boozy lady’s man, a cocky ladies man, a man who’s afraid of commitment, and the smartest woman I know. The odds sound fairly even.”

“Come on, we’re more than the sum of our parts,” Sam insists. 

“Call me back when you’ve made it through a full day without taking a drink,” she replies.

“Hey, the world’s ending! This is no time to get fussy about me.” He takes a long sip of his beer. 

This provides Jesse with an excuse to cut in. “Ladies man? Didn’t know you cared, Fi.”

Fiona’s busy staring at Michael. “You’re sure we can do this?”

“We’re unstoppable,” he reminds her. “As a team and separately.”

“See, oh ye of little faith?” Sam taunts.

Fiona burrows deeper into stacks of stories about fall colors and dating tips. “I have plenty of faith in me, Sam. It’s you I worry about…”

“No fighting,” Madeline demands, bending over to make a play for one of the coolers. She digs around, and then triumphantly pulls out a small carton of chocolate ice cream. “Ben and Jerrys, boys?”

“Desperate times, Maddie,” Jesse says.

“Did you get my yogurt?” Michael asks.

“It’s under the milk,” Sam says, and doesn’t suggest that might be spoiled. 

“Then they’re not so desperate,” Michael declares.

***   
_The hardest part about long-term sieges are definitely the waiting. Whether you’re stuck in one place for a week or a year, cabin fever is bound to set in. Figure in dwindling supply lines and the fact that one of you snores like a bulldog on acid and it’s time to consider pulling up stakes, no matter how safe and remote you thought your original location was. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor – especially if the people you’re stuck with happen to be the ones you love the most. Neat little plans come undone fairly easily, and you should always be ready to uproot at any moment. Maybe something your loved one says will change your mind; maybe the situation will worsen. Either way, you should be ready to change your life’s goals at a moment’s notice. But when you’re a spy, that makes it just another Friday night._

_March_

Midnight is, oddly, the least peaceful time of night for the group. The desperate hunger of the zombies drives them shambling into the darkness, where they can more easily skulk about for weak prey. Most of the remaining populace of Miami is smart enough to stay inside, but a few desperate or mad souls remain unwise enough to venture out into the darkness. That’s when Michael and Fiona (or Sam and Jesse, depending on who has drawn the night shift) job to pick off the zombies with long-range rifles. It is a thankless and yet worthwhile job, one that Sam and Michael do with pride, Fiona with a sense of nonchalance, and Jesse with arch humor.

They’re nearing the end of Michael’s deadline when Madeline suddenly pipes up from her nest of blankets on the sofa. “When are you going to teach me how to try?”

Maddie’s question makes Michael wonder why she’s trying to play a game with him. He’s seen her identify pistols from fifty paces away. “You already know I know how to shoot.”

l“Something that big?” She scoffs, sitting up. “I need to learn to brace myself for that kind of kick-back. And that’s why I’m asking you to teach me how to handle it.”

“It’s too dangerous, Ma,” Michael declares, pumping the trigger of Sam’s long-range rifle. 

Fiona glares at him from the sill. “Really, Michael?” she wonders. “She might be in a tough spot by herself – we should teach her how to shoot something bigger than that little pistol we gave her.” She pulls her trigger and smiles as a zombie falls dead in its tracks, a thin arterial spray of black decorating the door it had been pounding its fists into. Another bullet through the skull puts him down permanently. 

Michael’s recalcitrant expression melts a bit under his mother’s enthusiasm. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Why not?” she asks. “I need a hobby to get through this apocalypse.” 

Michael makes room by the window for her, then hoists his rifle up and toward the top of her shoulder. “Make sure the butt isn’t in contact with your shoulder,” he says. “Stick it in the hollow so it won’t break any of your bones if the kickback’s too sharp. Keep your eye trained through the sites.” Michael watches a shambling, green-skinned figure stumble its way up the street. “See that?” he asked. “Wait until it gets closer. When it’s right in your sites, squeeze the…”

Maddie squeezes. The rifle bucks against Michael’s side, Maddie’s forearm, and the open window frame – and the bullet quickly lodges itself in the brain of the zombie rampaging toward the Charger.

It makes a squalling sound, turning blindly toward the origin of its pain, circling clockwise like a dog with a crushed tail on the ground. Maddie uses that distraction to her advantage; two more bullets sink into the face of the zombie before it slumps, oozing, to the ground. 

Michael raises an approving eyebrow as Maddie puts down the rifle. 

“Did I do it right?” she asks dryly. 

“You did fine,” Michael says passionlessly. “And I don’t think you need me to teach you anything else.”

Madeline shrugs. “I think my aim was off,” she says. “I meant to shoot out one of its eyes.”

“That’s just…great, Ma,” Michael says, his voice numb with surprise. 

Fiona actually seems proud as she cuts a swathe through a small band of roaming zombies. “Great? That was excellent for a beginner. But you need to release the trigger faster,” she says to Maddie. “That’ll give you enough control to improve your aim. It’s the pressure of the recoil that makes you lose your sense of perception.”

Maddie preens, retrieving a cigarette from the pocket of her pajama pants and lighting it up. “Do you hear that, Michael? Fiona says I actually know what I’m doing.” Her voice drips with heavy sarcasm, and Michael actually cringes at the sidedness of his mother’s tone.

“Fiona’s got more experience with long range weaponry,” Michael says lightly. “She knows how to kill a man quicker than a truckload of synthesized poison.”

“Aww,” Fi replies, picking off a limping creature stumbling down the blind alley across from their perch. “You noticed, Michael. I’m so honored.” 

He bows at the waist, watching his mother load bullets into the .45 he’d bought her for protection a few months before the apocalypse. He’s disturbed by the ease with which his mother has adapted to their situation – not only can she joke about shooting zombies with a sense of confidence that belies the month-long anxiety fit preceding this day, She had been the one to successfully scavenge this week’s meals. She is resourceful as hell, bright as a whip, and when the chips fall she’s usually the one stiff-upper-lipping her way through things – which is why her reversion to her old self at the outset of the crises had so confused Michael. He’s been walking a fine line between treating her like a baby and treating her like an equal before their crises, in any event - now he finds himself respecting her as a fellow warrior. He tries to keep all of this surprise from registering outwardly, but Madeline grins and elbows him as she points the pistol and squints through the sites.

“I shot your father in the thigh with one of these.” 

Michael has spent years of his life repressing that incident, and he doesn’t appreciate its sudden intrusion into his reality. “…Thanks for sharing, Ma.”

“Don’t. I was aiming for his balls.” 

Michael groans and leaned against Fiona’s shoulder, and she gives him a gentle pat to the bare skin of his neck in response, her gun resting against her knee.

“He deserves it,” Maddie declares. “You knew he cheated on me, don’t you? Well, _I_ knew he was cheating on me, Michael, and I had to teach him a lesson. Anyway, it was only a flesh wound..” She picks up the rifle and peeks through the sites. “I wonder if I could pick one off from fifty feet…I learned how to do that from Sam. And I tried to get him to teach me how to use a long-range rifle but he wouldn’t let me touch….why are you looking at me?”

“Never mind,” Michael replies. Madeline picks up her own gun and prepared to fire on a small circle of stumbling creatures. He throws Fiona an impressed, alarmed stare, but Fi’s winsome face shows nothing but pride.

“How many more of them are out there?” Fiona wonders. 

“How many people were there in Miami in January?” Michael wonders wearily. The number of bodies they’ve dealt with in the past two months seems infinite to him; he and Sam spend an hour every night burning them, masks blocking the contagion’s path to their lungs and disposable gloves pitched crackling into the blaze afterwards. It’s emotionally difficult work; the faces of the burning children he’d disposed of haunted him still.

“Two million, two hundred and fifty-four thousand, six hundred and sixty five,” Sam says, sauntering out of the bathroom in a black robe. They’d chosen the plush suite well – it came complete with a shower they all abused as often as the generator would allow. He scrubs his hair with the towel, then quirks an eyebrow at their confused expressions. “What? I worked for the census department last year to make a little dough on the side! I don’t always have a sugarmomma at my fingertips.”

“Or at the tip of your cock,” Fiona flatlines.

“Fi..” Michael warns.

“Sam enjoys our banter,” she points out, leaving Madeline to cover for her as she walks back to her palate on the floor. 

“I WISH I had a girl at the tip of my…” Sam trails off, sees Madeline sitting at the window, and has the grace to blush and look away. “Trenches talk, Mad. Got too comfortable there.” He raises an eyebrow. “Hey, they’re finally letting you shoot.” He glances at Michael. “Don’t think it’s too dangerous?”

“I did,” Michael observes. 

“Yes, you did,” she replies, stiffly moving away from him. “Is Jesse back from the boiler room?”

“He’s still out there,” Michael says. “He should be fine, we gave him four bottles of oil, s’enough for the day…” His anxiety rose at that realization. When he hears Jesse’s familiar whistle at the doorstep he automatically relaxes. Two seconds later, the door slides open, and the generator whirrs to life.

“How’s it look out there?” Michael asks.

“Bad,” Jesse says flatly, throwing his gun onto the table. “I’m out of bullets.” He’d taken a moment to thin the roaming heard at ground level, and Michael can’t bring himself to complain about Jesse’s taking such a risk when risks like that are huge helpers.

Sam glowers. “I told you not to waste anything,” he scolds, picking up the piece and checking the barrel. “We’re down to our last case,” he unnecessarily reminds Jesse. “Any more and we’ll have to start melting jewelry for spares. 

“We could start melting down some chairs,” Fiona said, hands flying defensively toward the bauble looped around her neck. “We could try smelting in the furnace downstairs.” 

“And then we’ll have nothing to sleep on,” Sam replies, turning towards Michael. “We’re starting to run out of options, Mikey. Remember plan B?”

“I know,” Michael says, keeping his tone as calm and even as he could bear to. “We might have to move soon.”

“Woah, hold up - bad idea, Mike,” Jesse piped up. “There are even more of those things now than there were when we holed up here. Saw a couple hundred on our last trip scavenging a graveyard,” Jesse admits. “The government already cut off most of the escape routes out of town, so where in the hell are we going?”

Michael loads another slug into his Sig-Sauer. “We’ve got two choices: stay put and die, or raise hell on our way out. Sam, Fi? Did you bring incendiaries?”

“Some flashbangs and four bricks of c4.” 

Of course. Michael’s lips tip into a cold smile. “We’ll wait another week.” 

**** 

Two in the morning. Michael stares at his watch in disbelief as he tries to calculate the amount of time he’d bled during his nap. He’d lain down after his nightly patrol with Sam at nine; his skin still smells like burning flesh, so he’d skippe his single, routine daily shower. The world has tilted disorientatingly in the meantime; in the night Sam had decided to use him for a pillow and was snoring loudly into his armpit. They’re cuddled together like a couple of puppies searching for warmth, and he makes an effort to avoid waking Sam as he shifts toward the light pouring in from the constantly-open plate glass windows of the high rise.

Fiona’s stationed there, having drawn the night shift, and he can smell coffee and gunpowder in the air as he approaches her. He can almost taste the tension in her frame as he kisses the corner of her mouth. 

Below them, a wave of zombies stumble forward into the street lights, bumping into one another, groaning as they shuffle toward the center of town. “They’ve been walking in that direction for hours,” Fiona says, staring at them with her teeth locked to her tongue. 

“They’re following the scent of warm meat,” Michael replies. “Looking for an easy meal. Did the radio have anything to say about those survivors they had down at the courthouse?”

“Nothing. Michael, you don’t think…”

“I’ve told you what I think. They’re going for the easiest meal possible,” he says. “They might be technically dead but they’re still human enough to feel hungry. So they’ll take a pile of rotting meat instead of an active, fresh meal.”

Fiona shivers. “Look how many there are,” she said. “How can there be enough to feed them?”

“There never will be. Eventually, they’ll go necrotic,” he rubbed his temple. “One by one, they’ll rot and fall where they die. They’ll eat one another, and when they can’t find another morsel of flesh they’ll fall where they’re standing. It’ll rain, the run-off will pour into the sewers, and they’ll poison the waterways with their dead. Whatever’s alive to drink it will fall next. That’s why we burn whatever comes our way. No more traces behind us, nothing left for them to track.”

“Unless they smell us.” 

“Why we have a booby-trapped doorway,” Michael says. Fiona shakes her head. “Maybe Sam’s right. Plan b’s starting to look more and more appealing. When the sun’s up we should go.” His fingers tense against her upper arms. “What do you think?”

“Michael, this situation’s getting worse. Sam’s driven to every supply warehouse in the ten mile radius. If we don’t find a new line of food we won’t live beyond the next two months.” At last she agreed – stubbornly so, without admitting Sam might be right about something, but it was an agreement. “We’ve been here for two months. If they haven’t stopped coming by now it might never end.”

The latest line of attack begins to thin out; a few stragglers bumble by, dropping limbs in their wake as they rush to catch up with the group. But the two lovers have stopped watching their progress. Michael turns in the dim light to give Fiona a long look. “You really are beautiful,” he declares. “Even like this.”

“Even in the middle of an apocalypse, Michael?” She reaches through the space between them to loop her arms around his neck. “You’re trying terribly hard to be romantic when you already have the advantage of being the last man on earth.” 

“I don’t want to get out of practice,” he teases. “Isn’t it still survival of the fittest?”

“In this situation it’s survival of the living.” She kisses his ear. “That’ll do, Michael.”

Michael kissed her earlobe, whispering, “I swear I’m gonna get you out of here. You and my mother and Sam and Jesse…”

“All of us can take care of ourselves,” Fiona points out. “I’m more worried about you. You push yourself hard, Michael. If you get sick, I don’t want to deal with…” He tilts his head and watches her expression. “Waking up in the morning without you. Living in a world where I’ll never get to see your face again. Trying to deal with the fact that I lived and you died.” She pinches his cheek. “If you get sick, I’ll kick your ass, Westen.”

“Understood.” He laughs mirthlessly to himself. “You’re making me remember the way we were. God, we were poison to on another back in Ireland,” he sighed. “Think of all the time we wasted fighting….”

She pinches his bottom lip. “Life is too short to have regrets. We’re here now, Michael. Let’s love each other while we can.”

Michael dips his head, pecking her lips, kissing her neck. “No tomorrows, right?”

“All of the tomorrows, Michael. All of them.”

He reaches for her hand. Her smoke-scented, gunpowder-stained hand, with its wrecked manicure and roughly calloused thumb.

And then he kissed it. 

***   
_The best way to ward off a cluster of zombies is to supply yourself with a lot of bright light. Flashlights and lanterns work well, as do torches – don’t use items that refract small amounts of light – those won’t do you any good if you’re swarmed by a mob. If you must, tie together two gas station lighters. If you need to, create your own torches with a combination of butane, candle wax and used matchsticks. If they charge, remember the only thing that will put them down is a bullet right between the eyes. Not that a good blow to the back of the head won’t do the job just as well, but trust me – you don’t want to get too close to them. Keep all of your battles long-range, shoot only to kill, and keep your aim steady. If you’re too scared to see straight, then don’t trust yourself to have proper aim – rely on your friends or just those who have survived so far. But if you have the steadiest hand in the group, be prepared do go out shooting. Everything will depend on your toughness, and if you let them down you’ll never forgive yourself._

_April_

 

Two weeks after Easter, they finally run out of supplies, and Michael’s uncharacteristic dithering becomes a thing of the past. All of Sam’s fruitless questing finally comes to an end late on Tuesday morning, after Fiona baits a trap with their last jar of peanut butter. “It’s like all of my buddies just disappeared, Mikey,” he says, his smile quavering. Michael is kind enough to give Sam a gentle smile, give him the last beer while Fi covers for Jesse as he siphons gas into the Charger. But they both know that nobody ‘disappears’ in Miami nowadays . 

The five of them have a brief meeting, and the decision comes in a unanimous wave- they will travel to the only safe place they know offhandedly, Sam’s friend’s cabin in the swamp. Sam will be the back-up, Jesse would be the point-man, and Madeline will be forced to bring up the rear while Michael handles the supplies. The goal is to load the Charger and keep the horde away from their car, then take a series of back roads to evade whatever blockades had been erected by the state. With all radio traffic gone to static, the odds that they would suddenly be prevented from escaping were fairly low, and Michael was confident that the deserted streets would offer them no quarrel. Fiona wires the building with explosives made out of lard and leftover cooking ash, the flashbangs and the majority of the c4 for the future. Rigging them to an old remote detonator she’s been carrying around in her purse for emergencies. All of this went smoothly, and Michael anticipates the rest of the extraction to move smoothly.

But they should have prepared for the inevitable – for the zombies to smell their flesh, for them to waken and risk burning to death in the light to get to whatever living sustenance they could find. 

They had the van half-loaded when a growl alerts Michael to their presence; a high pitched scream fills his ears as one of them plunged its fist through a plate-glass window in a storeroom cat-corner to the building, reaching through the jagged hole it had made. A small blonde head emerges, dripping silent blood. A child. 

Fiona turns away and keeps busily strapping supplies into the car: Sam hovers over Michael’s shoulder, clutching his rifle. Only Madeline sees the pain and fear on the child’s face as it’s pulled into the sunlight like a mudbogged frog. “We have to,” Maddie begins, but Michael grabs her and pressed her face into his chest – they’re already too late, the blood to perfuse to spell anything but death. Sam rips open the side door of the Charger as one of the zombies rears upward, its head cocked like a curious dog as its mouth pours red. Fiona gets off as single shot as Jesse slides into the driver’s side seat, lips scented like gasoline.

“Mike! Now!”

Michael shoves Maddie into the backseat and gets off two rounds as he vaults the hood of the car. To his amazement, he ses that there are twenty of them inside the store, now flooding through the broken window, bearing down like vampires on a chunk of hot, fresh meat. He throws himself into the driver’s seat with Fiona landing in his lap. 

“DRIVE!” Jesse orders him, as the first one bellows a victory cry.

To his horror, that howl draws dozens of creatures down on them, crawling on all fours like spiders from the alleys and out windows, a river of maggots crawling across the wounded eye of the city. Whatever didn’t immediately burn upon being exposed to sunlight stagger, smoking, toward them.

Sam gulps, his knee in Jesse’s back and Madeline’s face buried in his thigh. “faster! FASTER man!” A screech and the sound of metal rending scrapes at Michael’s heart, but he guns the engine and whatever had latched onto the trunk them falls away into the mass of black-clad brethren. 

“Fi?” Michael breathes, his arm locking around her waist to hold her back from the bumpy, violent path. 

She givse him a grim smile, her eyes alive, and the slightest note of merriment in her expression. Twisting the wires toward detonation, she hooks the ends together, causing the entire building to ignite in a rain of fire and brimstone.

The shrieking grows louder behind them as they take a hard corner; a desiccated limb flies through the back window of the charger and lands with a sickening thump. Sam and Madeline squirm away from it while Michael and Fiona grab their pistols and started shooting for all they’re worth. 

The windshield fills with gory splatter as they blast away. One last boost from the Charger’s engine and they outrun the last, most determined creature. The deserted streets are theirs at last, and with that realization Michael and Fiona sit back with a sigh.

“Canned spam anyone?” Fiona asks, poking the limb with her heel. Its fingers wriggles and Sam hollers his surprise. “Oh come on, boys. A little hand can’t hurt any of us.” She grins and promptly prods it in Michael’s direction. “Have a spike?”

Michael shakes his head. “We’ll have to hold it down the old fashioned way.” His foot comes down on the flexing palm with a satisfying thud, causing Sam to cringe. “Are you all right? You look a little green.”

“Did you see their idea of eating out?” Sam asks, tucking a sweat-laden lock of hair behind his ear. Michael’s found a network of back roads that take them by the main arteries but not across them, avoiding a huge cement blockade cordoning off the onramp to the only bridge out of town. “Mike, where are you going?”

“Heading to the Silverlight Pass,” he says. “There should be a way north through there.” 

Overhead, a plane ominously thunders by. All five of them glance upward, Michael quickly locking his eyes back onto the road. It was a B-52.

“Airstrike,” Michael whispers. 

“We’re going to have to do a lot of lying,” Sam says, “to make anyone believe we weren’t stuck in that city.”

“That’s crazy,” Madeline declares. “Wouldn’t they be happy to see us?”

“Mad, honey,” Sam says intensely, “whatever’s walking around in that city’s gonna be fried to a crisp in ten minutes.” Which is why Michael’s pace doubles; they’re pulling toward the southernmost exit, making their way toward the country roads that will guarantee their freedom.

“Hiding’s the discrete thing to do now,” Michael says. “Sam was right.”

A watery chuckle comes from the back seat. “When am I not?”

“So,” he continues on, “we’ll hide until the quarantine order’s lowered. At least we’ve got proof there’s still life out there.”

Suburban streets whiz by as the air fills with tendrils of smoke, the percussive, almost unendurably loud sound of buildings falling with the wrenching screech of metal melting and bending toward the ground. 

“You think we stand a chance of getting out?” Jesse wonders. 

Michael shrugs. “Those things are getting more violent every day.” 

“And they’re growing in number,” Jesse adds. He cringes. “They’re gonna want our flesh. Gonna try to eat us all alive.” As if on cue, a garbled roar sounds from nearby. 

“Do you still have the bait we made?” Sam asks.

Jesse presses his elbow against the dash and hauls a large hank of spoiled meat from the passenger side seat of the Charger. “One ham fastball, coming up.” 

Using a tiny string of fishing wire, he dangles the hock out the door. The growling grows louder as they drive deeper into the suburbs, further toward the coastal highway and the swamps. When they draw a pack of bloody-liped, wild-eyed bastards to their side, Jesse holds up the blood-saturated side of ham and flung it off the shoulder of the road, causing a group of their pursuers to run off the road and jump into the opposing lane, where they are crushed in a riot of limbs, rolling down the side of an embankment in a mass of smoking flesh.

“Genius,” remarks Fiona lightly. 

“Genius? It looks like something from a Three Stooges movie!” protests Madeline.

“I’ll go with Fi’s assessment. We don’t have that many bullets, and we barely have enough gas to keep the car running . We need to pool our resources as much as we can,” Michael says. “Good work, Jesse, Sam.” 

“Hey, when I see a pile of pork, I pick it up,” Sam laughs. He kept an eye on the back road, but the small pod of zombies they’d attracted had quietly disappeared into the ether. “There’s a bunch of hunter’s cabins down by the swamp,” he says. “Keep on driving north and we should find the right ones. All right with the rest of you?” 

“As long as we don’t have to waste more ham,” Fiona says. “And I suppose you could work on your tan.” She pokes Sam and he rolls his eyes. 

“Anything that keeps us together,” Michael says.

The sun is starting to dip below the horizon. Somewhere behind them, Miami is a smoking crater in the ground.

Their day can only improve from this point on.

***  
 _As a blond, and now probably zombified, rock singer once sang, the waiting is the hardest part. When you’ve been trapped in someone’s executive suite for two months straight with only a pile of magazines, a couple of old romance novels and a to keep you entertained, cabin fever is bound to set in. Waiting is the hardest part, but with a few simple board games and plenty of good stories, it doesn’t have to be the worst one._

Sam’s buddy’s cabin is situated at the base of the Okefenokee, just by a freshwater stream that empties energetically into a large swamp. It’s perhaps too comfortable for five people, with a large living room, a nearly endless stockpile of Books and DVDs in the study, warm clothing and a mountain of canned food sitting in the locked cupboards over a gas range. There are four feather beds and a heating system that runs on gas power. Out back is a hydroponic garden filled with vegetable and fruit plants that are well-tended and well-trimmed. Sam’s friend, it turns out, had been a Argentinian businessman who was also a paranoid survivalist type. On a permanent hiatus from America due to a ‘little’ tax snafu, he owes Sam big-time because, according to Sam, “there’s a bullet lodged in my shoulder with his name on it. He said I could stop by anytime,” Sam says, as they disabled the lock with a blast of Co2 and jimmy it open. “Hope he doesn’t mind me taking him at his word.”

The gang counts their blessings. They can jury rig the gas stove to work on carbon emissions if they run out of power, and can always fashion their own grill if need be. They make plans to cage some local wildlife and start to learn the art of cultivation. Jesse heads out back to check on the generator while Fiona sets to unpacking their accumulated belongings and meager supplies. Madeline immediately begins searching through the volumes of books lining the wall, and Michael and Sam finish assessing the situation.

“This is fairly nuevo riche,” observe Michael. “Are you sure you’re not hiding an extra girlfriend on us, Sam?”

“Nope, Mikey – no gals, just the old connections I blabbed about,” Sam insists. “And I’m sure Arturo will still be in Spain. There’s no way he’d hightail it back here with our little zombie problem taking up the front page of every major paper in the country.” Michael eyes Sam as they started organizing their supplies. “What?” Sam laughed. “I’ve got rich friends, too. I don’t sleep with all of them!”

“Which is why I wonder why you choose to live off of the riches of women,” Michael replies. They start arming the doorways with the reserved flashbang packs while keeping an eye on Jesse working in the garden. Through the wall of plastic insulation, he bends to gather together a mountain of cucumbers and an armful of zucchinis, dumping them into a plastic container for later use. 

He doesn’t see the shapeless form until it’s on him, doesn’t pick up the overpowering stench of rotting flesh because it has been covered by the scent of freshly-turned potting soil. A perfect crime was in the making, one none of them had seen coming.

Sam goes for the door as Jesse reaches for his own gun. Michael’s reaction – after years of being a stalwart, helpful soldier – is to shout and pound at the closed door. “JESSE!” . The man in question pounds ineffectually on the layer of plastic separating them as the zombie’s teeth dig into his neck. It’s Sam who pries the lock and takes down the zombie with a single shot between the eyes. 

“Are you okay?” Sam asks, hacking the body into bits with a shovel. Michael’s feet unglue themselves, and he pushed his way into the greenhouse, grabbing a pair of gardening gloves before ripping a strip of material from his shirt and kneeling to press both against Jesse’s wound. Jesse doesn’t say anything, and Michael keeps watching Jesse’s face for some sign of change, some hint he might suddenly turn. Sam doesn’t look up until he’s finished hacking the melting creature into bits. “Brother, you all right?”

Jesse holds his neck, cringing as he notices the blood dripping from his wound down the inside of his arm. “Do I look okay?” he pants. “Bastard got the drop of me. I don’t believe it…” He turns toward Michael. “Go ahead. C’mon, Michael, do it.”

“Whatt’re you saying?” Michael wonders.

“You know what he has to do,” Jesse says firmly. “Save yourself and Sam, save the girls, keep them from turning into monsters.” Michael hesitates. “Shoot me, damn it!”

Michael peeles back the bandage, cringing at the livid purple bite mark; half-moons of blood rise up from each purple square. He doesn’t note any punctures, just gashes – and from the corner of his eye sees a blood-spattered rake two inches from Jesse’s head. “I don’t know if it broke the skin. Maybe you could wash it out…”

“It’s over man. Don’t you get it?” Jesse shakes his head. “One of Sam’s friends told us it takes two days for the infection to cut through your blood. If you don’t take my head off before then, I’ll be one of ‘em.”

Michael shakes his head. “I’m not giving up,” he says. Sam’s already back in the house, and he can hear his mother asking for Jesse. The back porch is illuminated by a sudden beam of light.

“SHUT IT OFF!” Michael screams. He doesn’t, selfishly, want to see Jesse turn, doesn’t want the weight of that memory lingering in the back of his head for the rest of his life. 

Michael cloaks his desperation as they ignore him and the back porch light throws shadow on Madeline’s pinched features. Sam pushes her out of the way, rushing back into the greenhouse with a first aid kit in hand, throwing it open, peeling through the contents within for help. 

He pulls out a bottle of alcohol and Michael surrenders his bloody rag; Sam dumps half the bottle on it and gives Jesse a sympathetic cringe as Michael scoopsd it back up. “Hold still,” he says. Sam’s hand shoots out and grabs Jesse’s as Michael braces himself against the younger man’s shoulder and upper back. First, Sam dumps the rest of the bottle of astringent into his wound, and Michael slaps the rag against Jesse’s puncture wound.

Jesse lets out a scream, his eyes squeezed closed in agony. “I’m sorry,” Sam shouts under the sound of it, but Jesse bites back further reaction to the pain. Only the crickets and Jesse’s sobbing exhalations are audible. After several heaving breaths, he says, “you know this won’t help. Nothing kills it once it bites you.

“It might not have bitten all the way through the muscle tissue – you could have cut yourself in the fall. Sam, do you have a needle in there?”

“There’s dental floss back in the house - I’ll have one of the girls sterilize a sewing needle,” he says, climbing to his feet. “Hold on, Jess,” he demands.

“Just forget it.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Mike, man?”

“Jesse?”

“If you ever see Pearce again,” he says, “tell her that I kept thinking about her. It’s the only thing that’s been keeping me going, knowing she’s out there living through this.”

“You don’t need me to tell her,” Michael insists. “You’re gonna do it yourself.” He gently shakes Jesse, melting into the melodrama of the moment. 

“Stay with us, brother,” Sam orders, reappearing with the needle. “Jess? JESSE!” he demanded. 

“I’m here. In too much damn pain not to be.” Sam’s brought a treat along with him, a bottle of booze to kill the pain. He tosses Michael a tube of antibiotic ointment for the wound, followed by a bottle of penicillin. Jesse grabbed it with his good hand and slugged it all down. 

“Feel better?” Michael wonders, his eyes peeled for further trouble. Jesse doesn’t say anything, but he stares at his knees with a glower warping his features. Finally, he shakes his head. “I do. But it doesn’t matter because you know what you have to do,” he says firmly. “If you see any symptoms, take me out.”

“I…”

“Take me out, Mike.” He climbs to his feet and takes a composing breath. “If you can’t do it, I want Sam to.”

“I will,” Sam said without hesitation, and Michael turns toward him with a look of incredulous disappointment. “What, Mikey? This is trench warfare. We don’t have any room for the walking wounded.” Sam is the sentimental one, Michael thinks to himself, horror dawning on his features. Michael cringes to himself as they walk back into the house. If Sam thought massacring their best friend on the planet was a good and lawful thing to do, what sort of morality were they living under now? Could he attempt to adjust to this new world forming around him?

Did he want to try?

*** 

_If you’re ever stuck living in a zombie apocalypse, try to raise small game. Zombies won’t be as interested in the small brains of your delicious little animal buddies when there are bigger rewards nearby – if you have enough firepower, you can kill them at a distance while they’re still confused by your harmless bunny friend. Along with basic food plants like tomatoes, carrots, and peas. Potatoes and onions are also useful._

_July_

The days pass by quickly but inventively. Michael and Sam rig a water purification system with leftover PVC pipes and a steam-powered filter. With Sam’s technical know-how, they put together a heating and cooling system to augment the generators that would operate off of freshly-pressed cooking fat – which they skimmed from occasional butchering of the pigs Fiona had found running wild in the swamps. Together with Fiona, they craft a munitions system that turned scrap and stone into IMD bombs, all of which were planted with shovels and spades far out from the little cabin with a crude tripwire system that set off a piercing alarm within the cabin (too frequently, Maddie complained). Maddie and Sam cage chickens and herbs from an abandoned farm two miles up the road; they raise them up together with the piglets and rabbits Michael caught on a foraging mission. Maddie cultivates their carrot tops and potato bottoms into a larger vegetable garden, planting peas and growing berry samples and orange trees behind the house to supplement what the greenhouse produces. Jesse holds up; the hours pass and his body never takes on the necrotic decomposition that signals the onset of death. Nevertheless he draws inward, as if taking stock of his young life with fresh purpose. They live through learning, and through utter determination, too afraid to talk aloud of days that pass between them and too worried about the next day to consider what the next moment might bring. 

Time still has significant meaning, if only to mark the hours and make their survival seem more meaningful. Sam celebrates his fiftieth birthday at the cabin, and Madeline scares up a flourless chocolate cake with strawberries for him. They dance to some dusty rock records while Michael does the dishes and the crickets chirp. Michael and Fiona celebrate their second anniversary together under the huge boxwood trees that mark the front entranceway, just far enough away from the rabble within and the cacophony without to allow for a scrap of privacy. They make love with a rifle under Fiona’s knee, a .45 in her left hand. 

They set up a small stone memorial for the people they know and love, the likely victims of the long sprawl of this virus. Sam’s peahens to his lost girlfriends made up an enormous pile of paper beside Michael’s marker for Nate and Fiona’s memorial for her family in Ireland. Jesse had lost her mother long ago but could write a song in stone over his feelings for Pearce. Madeline’s are the saddest – a list of friends and bridge club associates, neighbors and lovers. Virgil’s name, written in tiny pebbles embedded next to a mint plant, speaks a thousand sad words about her loneliness.

The inertia would have been painful, if they didn’t have their daily battles to distract them, the sweet company of one another for protection. But because of that companionship the all bear up, even thrive, under their sequestration from the rest of the universe.

At the tail-end of August, Jesse comes rushing in from the pig pen, grabbing the first gun he can find off the table and charging back out. Sam and Michael are right behind him, their own weapons out and ready. They’re halfway up the road before Sam turns to Michael and blurts out, “why the hell are we running?”

Jesse stops dead in the middle of the road and dives off the pathway, into a field of sweet grass growing head-high to Sam. “Over there,” he says, hiking through the long, thick grass, clambering over branches and rushing around the high mound of a small hill. When Sam and Michael climb the summit behind Jess, they see a small band of zombies meandering through the forest, no more than a few feet from where Jesse had rushed to.

“Jesus,” Sam says, hefting up his rifle and stabbing his finger down on the trigger. “It’s an ambush!” He picks off one, two moments after Michael buries another bullet in the cheek of a rotting man in a clown suit.

“Jesse,” Michael says firmly. “Go…” But before he can scare the words from his reluctant throat, Jesse lets out an unearthly roar and throws himself into the path of the shambling zombies.

The ensuing carnage is so stomach-churningly graphic that both Sam and Michael, even with all of their combined experience, are left gaping in abject horror at the spectacle of flesh being ripped and torn asunder, teeth scattering across the ground like popcorn kernels tossed to a flock of hungry pigeons. 

When the dust has cleared, Michael takes stock of himself. A glance at Sam finds him unharmed but wide eyed – all of the color has drained out of his features, making his prominent jaw and dark eyes look stark and hollow in the strong stricture of his bones. Michael himself does nothing, as rooted to the ground as he had been when Jesse was first attacked.

But it was their friend who rises from the mountain of carnage, licking his lips, smoothing down his shirt and tucking his gun into the waistband of his jeans. Not a blade of grass stirred or a bird tweeted while Jesse took stock of himself, wiped his mouth against the back of his hand. He seems to notice them at last, standing rooted on the hill and lifts his hand in greeting. “Sorry man,” he says. “Just wanted a little back-up in case it went bad.”

Sam’s fingers clamped hard against Michael’s upper arm. “Jesus,” he whispers.

Michel didn’t notice what Sam had seen at some earlier point in the melee. While every other part of Jesse remains as it always had been, his face, his expression, and his eyes have changed into something fresh and feral. The color and grade of the irises have turned green, semi-translucent, like an odd patch of bogwater gone suddenly brackish.   
They were the demonic cat’s eyes of one of those creatures.

***   
Fiona and Madeline didn’t believe them when they finally returned home. “He ATE them?” Fiona’s nose wrinkles in disbelief. 

Jesse shrugs. “I was hungry. It was kill or be killed,” he calls.

Five heads peer around the dividing partition separating the kitchen from the living room. “Great, now he’s got super hearing,” Sam hisses. “I’m gonna have to resort to morse code…”

“Stop being dramatic, Sam,” Michael complains.

“Dramatic?!” Sam glares in the direction of the door. “He’s one of those goddamned things and you’re calling me dramatic?” 

“Sam’s right,” Madeline says behavior. Michael recalls the ferocity with which she had once sheltered Jesse and raises an eyebrow. “We need to make a plan. If we don’t decide what to do until it’s too late, that infection could take more of us!”

“Yo. I can still hear you!”

Sam leans in closer, whispering in a low voice, “I dunno about you guys, but I sure as hell didn’t sign up for some X-Men comic.”

“Stop talking about him like he’s an animal,” Fiona snaps. “He’s right in the living room!”

“Fi’s right y’know,” Jesse says, appearing in the doorway with a book tucked under his arm. “’Cause I can still hear everything you’re saying. Super hearing.”

Sam’s features crumple into a disgusted pout as he takes in the scene before him. “I dunno what the hell those thing did to him,” he snaps. “All I know is that it’s bad news. He’s part-zombie…” Sam pauses, as if in disbelief over his own words. “…I know what I’d like you to do to me, if I ever turned into one of those things. But all I know is that there’s gotta be some order established around these parts.”

“How John Wayne,” Fiona smirksd.

“Michael?” Maddie asks – looking to him, as always, for order.

“I’m with Sam.” He looks at Jesse. “How do you feel? What the hell made you do that?”

Jesse shrugs. “I told you – I could smell them coming over the hill. They wanted us, wanted to make us PART of them, and there was no way I was gonna let that happen. So I put the hurt on them.”

“If that was the hurt,” Sam says, “I’m scared to see what it’d be like if you unleashed whoopass on ‘em!”

Jesse shrugs. “Just following the call of the wild, brother.”

“That’s great, Jess,” Sam replies “When did the whole flesh eating part come into the deal?”

Jesse raises an eyebrow. “I was hungry. Waste not, want not, y’know?” Sam’s gun was out and trained on him in a moment. “Woah, simmer down. I’m not hungry for regular, living people,” Jesse says. “Just those things. Whenever they’re near me, all I wanna do is wanna wreck them, make ‘em sorry they’ were born.” 

“Whatt’re you, some kinda slayer now?” Sam cracks. “You aren’t gonna go full-on Angelus on us, are ya?” Fiona rolls her eyes at Sam. “Come on! I watched for the worldbuilding!” Sam complains, gesturing with his gun and causing everyone in the vicinity to duck.

Jesse shrugs. “And they don’t taste bad raw.”

Sam’s trigger finger relaxes, but the gun isn’t in his pocket yet. “If you touch one hair on either of these gal’s heads…”

“’Touch one hair on our heads?’ We may be in the middle of an apocalypse,” Fiona declares, “but I could still beat Jesse six ways from Sunday. Why must you be a chauvinist?”

Jesse pointes at Fi. “Annd Fiona’s right. So why don’t we drop it?”

“You ate a human being!” Sam shouts. “What would you rather talk about, the weather?”

“Look, man, the whole point is that whatever they did to me, it didn’t kill me. It made me stronger, better. I can sense those things coming within a hundred miles of this place.” Jesse raises an eyebrow. “If that means I’ve gotta eat a couple of them to keep you guys safe, I’ll go through with it. Understood?”

Sam lifts his chin in acknowledgement, so Jesse grabs a fistful of cookies from the counter and ducks back into the living room. Sam grabs Michael’s shoulder. “Outside, man, now.”

“Right,” Michael replies. He isn’t sure what Sam wants to say; there’s nothing TO say, when your friend becomes a zombie hybrid out of the blue. The only thing Michael wants was a mouthful of his mother’s roast chicken. So they stand in the shade of their porch and try to face each other in the darkness.

Sam draws himself up rigidly and tries to look stern, blocking the path to the back doorway. With the concrete wall between them and Jesse, he clearly feels comfortable enough to speak freely. “Whatt’re we going to do, Mike?”

Michael doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Just what he asked us to do. If he’s fine with being that way, and if he’s not a danger to any of us there’s no need to put him down.”

“But what if we’re not there? What if your mother…”

“My mother can shoot a zombie in the balls from forty feet away,” Michael says. “I’m not afraid of anything happening to any of you at this point. You’re too strong as a team. If it Nate or Samantha were around, I’d have shot him when he turned.” With emphasis, Michael said, “I trust you with my life, with my flesh. I know none of you will let me down if I ever turned on you.”

Sam gives a thoughtful nod. “If I wake up to him beating me over the head with some poor schmuck’s arm I’m gonna have to pull a Hoboken on him.” 

“A Hoboken? You’ve gotten harsh, Sam.”

“It’s the end of the world, Mikey.” He squints into the shrouded, distant fog that perpetually shrouded the swamp in mist. “I feel fine. How about you?”

Michael’s smile is ghostly. “Feeling pretty psyched, Sam.”

***

“We’re just going to get used to it?!” Madeline cries out. “He ate six zombies!”

“But he’s still himself,” Fiona says. “Those things lose their minds almost the second they turn. Jesse outlived everything they’ve thrown at him by miles!”

Madeline eyes the boys as they came through the door. “We’re keeping him alive?”

“For the time being,” Michael says, his voice cool and affectless. “Okay?”

“Fine,” Madeline growls. “I’ll start wearing barbecue sauce flavored underwear!”

“Didn’t need that mental image, ma,” Michael says. Madeline stomped off toward her room, leaving Michael, Sam and Fiona alone in the kitchen. 

“Do you think he’ll stay this way forever?” Fiona wonders.

“Gonna have to wait and see,” Michael says.

“We’re not neurobiologists,” Sam adds.

“That’s the one course Michael didn’t take in spy school,” she replies. “What a pity.” 

Fi kisses Michael on the cheek and leads him away. They never notice the bittersweet cast of Sam’s smile as he turns down the lights and joins Jesse for a sandwich and midnight movie in the parlor. 

***

Christmas proves an interesting affair. Fiona presents Michael with a scavenged P .45, and he makes her a snowglobe in the workshed out back. “Fiona’s first apocalypse,” she reads the legend. “How droll, Michael.” He’d used rubbing alcohol, a light bulb, glitter and twigs to effect the gift.

“I was hoping you’d say ‘beautiful,’” he replies flatly, which earned Michael a kiss to the temple.

Michael and Fiona had microbrewed a cask of beer, mothered by the last dregs of Sam’s final bottle of commercial brewskie. It is strong but not perfected when Sam has his first sip, yet he proudly pronounces it the finest beer in the land. They find an axe for Jesse (which he took maniacal delight in), an Jesse receives a suit, hemmed, cut and sewed by Madeline out of an old pair of curtains with a hat to match. Sam and Jesse have found Maddie a bushel of basil plants, which they’d been cultivating in secret for them for months. She’d made Sam a lopsided ski cap in return, and Michael a sweater. Fiona gets a scarf, which proves to be Maddie’s sole excursion into attractive knitwear. 

Sam cooks, giving Maddie the day off from all kitchen duties and trying to keep their flagging spirits up. “One of these days,” he says, “that radio’s gonna give us some good news.”

Michael raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Instead of static and the National Anthem.”

“How much longer do you think it’s going to be?” Madeline finally asks. She doesn’t have the courage to look up from the copy of Gone With The Wind she’d been reading to note their reactions. 

“When they die out,” Jesse says. “When that happens, we’ll know.”

“But there are millions of dead people out there,” Maddie says. “We don’t have many supplies.”

“We don’t have that many bullets,” Michael says. “Tissue’s temporary. It rots. When it rubs off, they’ll die.” 

Jesse glances at the back of his hand, scratches it nervously. Fiona coughs pointedly. Michael gives her an impassive, unimpressed glare.

Sam cringes. “They’re like evil Velveteen Rabbits.” 

“Wonderful analogy. Can we eat?” Fiona wonders.

“Gonna say grace?” Sam teases.

“God. We’re alive. Thank you,” Fiona says, and stabbed her fork through the silky mass of her potatoes.

*** 

_Even the strongest of fortresses is bound to have a weakness. Be prepared for your enemies to find your flaws and try to exploit them – the key to your salvation, as always, remains in your response to disaster. The most vulnerable part of the zombie body is the genital area. If one of them grabs you from behind, strike them just above the groin with the strongest part of your own body – and that would be your elbow. Keep your neck protected and don’t let your limbs come within an inch of their faces – use your feet to kick in any weakening joints and loosen that connective tissue. Once it lets you go anything heavy and easily-wielded makes a good weapon – if that means destroying Aunt Sophia’s antique table to give it a whack over the head, then so be it. Once it’s on the ground crater its head in with a sharp blow – destroying the brain is still the only way to survive a zombie attack. When you dispose of the body, be sure to wear rubber gloves. Don’t get the blood near your mouth, never allow it to seep under the gloves, and thoroughly. A hundred percent of the infection lingers in the saliva of the monster so if you see it drooling or if you can’t lift it away without touching its mouth, let nature take its course and the body rot where it fell. Keep a cool head and don’t panic. The future of the world rests in your capable hands and your fleet feet. Never look back._

****   
_February_

Winter in Florida proves dissimilar to winter in every other part of the country. There is never the level of snow and chill encountered elsewhere, but the wind has a way of whipping across the swamps and cutting into your bones that makes even hearty Midwesterners like Sam shiver in apprehension. The radio remains silent, the outside world seemingly forgetting them as time stretches forward into an inky nothingness. 

They have finished their adaption well. Surviving this close to the land – even in the comparative luxury of the cabin – gave them far too much to think about and far too many distractions to deal with. Not that this stopped Sam from teasing the two of them about their future plans.

“Are you two getting down with the whole ‘repopulate the planet’ thing?” asks Sam of Fiona and Michael one afternoon.

“Incredible, Sam,” Jesse says, startling Michael as he slams into the room. “I think that joke’s even older than you.” 

“C’mon, man cool it! As long as Maddie’s alive I’m not the oldest person around.” He pauses. “Wow, I made myself sad.”

“Michael,” Fiona says, moving toward the kitchen door, “can I speak with you in private?”

“Sure,” Michael says. They bring their voices down to whispers, standing close to the kitchen door so the wind might block Jesse’s reception of their argument. “What did you want?”

There is a significant pause before Fiona speaks. “How do you feel about it?”

“About what?” he wonders, and Fiona stares at him, the fury in her eyes making her intent quite clear. “A baby?! Fiona….”

“Well…”

“Well what?” Michael raises an eyebrow. “We’re not going to bring a kid into this mess.” 

“It hasn’t been much of a mess for days,” says Fi. “We haven’t seen a zombie for four weeks now. Maybe they all just died off and we’re alone? What if Sam’s right and it’s our job to repopulate the earth?”

“Even if every single person on the face of the earth is dead, even if every animal in existence had died this would be wrong. I’m not going to make you a brood sow for the apocalypse.” Fiona frowns, brushing a hank of dark hair out of her eyes, and Michael reacts to her embarrassed distress by wrapping his arms around her shoulders. He says, “we might need to leave at any moment, and if you get pregnant you’d automatically become more vulnerable…”

“A pregnant woman can…”

“You’d be protecting two people at once, Fi. It’s more dangerous, and it’s not fair to put that kind of weight on you. I won’t let you make yourself a target.”

She scoffs. “I could shoot, outrun, and outlast any man even with a babe in my belly.”

“I’m sure,” says Michael. “In fact, I know you could. But there’s always a risk factor. Fi,” he squeezes her tensile muscles, the feather-weight of her bones. “You know how I feel about us. But I can’t risk your getting hurt. I WON’T let you risk something like this.”

“But what if we don’t have any more time?” she finally asks.

“Then we go down together, fighting. Fiona, you never wanted to have kids. In fact, you asked me to get a vasectomy back in Florida,” Michael reminds her.

At that, she gives a mirthless laugh and rests her head against his shoulder. “It’s all a terrible cliché, isn’t it?” Fiona cringes. “The little woman trying to make a home in the middle of an apocalypse. I just keep rolling it over and over again in my mind.” She squeezes her eyes shut, took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m going positively mad.”

“It’s the isolation,” he suggests. “We’re stuck together out in the middle of a swamp. I don’t expect you to keep yourself together every second of the day.” He holds her tightly. “We’re not the last people on the planet, Fi. I can guarantee that somewhere somebody’s wondering if they’re the last person on earth, too. And even then we’d still have the team.”

She squeezes his arm. “I know.” She turns around and heads back into the kitchen. “Come on now. Let’s have a slice of cake. Your mother’s been bragging about it all day.”

“That actually sounds pretty good.” Even his mother’s atrocious baking has become an appealing distraction lately.

Together, they return to the half-finished dishes, the relative warmth of the cabin, and the promise of another movie night with the rest of the family.

***

That night, it happens without discussion. They drift into Michael and Fiona’s room together without having discussed it beforehand, or asking their permission. While Madeline slept, they curl together against the huge mattress in the master bedroom, arms around shoulders, thighs looped over thighs, hands resting against ribcages and feet locked around calves. It was a single mass of human flesh lollygagging in the warmth. 

They forget about personal boundaries, right and wrong, even about the possibility of there being no tomorrow. They are simply, entirely, and gratefully unified in warmth and peace. 

“What are we doing?” Michael wonders, out of the blue.

“Loving each other,” Fiona says, almost plaintively. She doesn’t want the mood to break, for them to separate. Michael’s fingers run down her side, his eyes glowing in the darkness, hands coming to rest upon Sam’s pressed-flat digits. It is powerful, nurturing, an expansion that none of them have ever considered adding to their relationship. But it works. It heals them for the moment. And that makes it worthwhile.

Hours pass. The sun crawls over the blue-tipped trees and fills the room. Jesse is the one who moves toward the light, blinking at it in some new awareness, blocking the burning heat from his eyes with a soft cry. At the sound Michael stirs, rubbing his face, trying to figure out why the wall has suddenly become so interesting.

“What are you…” 

“Something’s coming,” Jesse says, leaping toward the window, grabbing Michael’s rifle from the floor before pumping it twice. 

Glass shatters. A blistered arm reaches through the gap and Jesse rips it off, beating the zombie’s head in until it is a red slushy pulp of muscle and bone. 

With that, the siege begins. 

***

They reinforce the windows and block the stairs. One of them takes the night shift, the other four sequestering themselves in the bedroom for fitful moments of sleep. The easy days lie behind them – paranoia has set in, and it rusts their bonds and cemented their belief in self-preservation.

They turn a corner one afternoon three months after the first invasion. Jesse has a theory, held forth the possibility that they might have been tracking them the entire time. “They’re tricky sons of bitches,” he declares. “I have a feeling they’ve been planning this for months.”

Sam argues for hours that they couldn’t possibly be that bright. After all, Jesse had shredded the first surge to a violent but mercifully quick death in two seconds flat. 

“They let me kill them, Sam.” Sam’s glare tells Jesse that he doesn’t believe him. Sinking in another headshot, he explains, “they led me to them on purpose, so they could follow my scent back to the cabin. They waited until we felt safe and then attacked.” 

“How the hell do you know?”

“Why else would they chase me all the way back home? How could they get past our traps and the land mines we planted? They know I’m like them, part of their herd.” He lays down his gun, started unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s me they want. And I’m gonna give it all to them.”

“Jess!” Sam barks.

“Jesse!” Madeline gasps.

If he hears them his determination was so firm that their words are tiny stings to his quickly pumping heart. Jesse begins yanking the boards from the window with his bare hands, making a hole large enough to crawl through. Sam runs through the dining room to stop him, but Jesse has prepared himself for such a charge – he blocks Sam’s egress with a spread palm. Sam lands with a heavy clatter on the floor, his arms shooting out to grab Jesse’s ankle while the younger man climbed through the space between Sam and the doorway.

“LET. ME. GO!”

The authority in the younger man’s voice isn’t enough to shut Sam out. “I’m not gonna let you commit suicide!” he shouted.

“Let me do this, man,” he demands. “Just let me go.”

Sam’s fingers loosens slowly around Jesse’s ankle. “If this doesn’t work I…”

“Don’t come after me. Keep Maddie safe.” 

Jesse turns toward the window. “Come on!” he shouts into the forest glen, hearing the palmetto trees rustle in the wind. “I’m here!” The words bounce off of walls, the trees, filling the emptiness of the world with the abrupt blast of his voice. 

Branches snapd underfoot and tree limbs peeled back. Face by face, foot by foot, the horde appear, smoke curling from their bodies. Sam counts them, estimates them to be in the hundreds as they surround the porch, staring at Jesse.

“You’re gonna have to eat me raw,” he tells them. “I’m allergic to barbeque sauce…” he trails off. The zombies simply look at him, rocking to and fro on their feet, without making a single aggressive move. 

“RUN!” Sam shouts. “Jess, come on!”

But there will be no attack that afternoon. Instead, they move as a single wave, falling to their knees, bowing for Jesse in a single gesture of solidarity.

“What. In the hell?” Sam squeaks out. Madeline grabs him by the cuff of his tropical shirt, staring in open-mouthed silence.

“Guys,” Michael cries, coming downstairs with his shirt askew and his fly unzipped, “what happened? Why did you stop?”

Sam gestures toward the window. “They’re _worshipping_ him.” He feels Fiona’s presence behind him, her fingers wrapping around his wrist, gently squeezing.

Michael, in all of his varied years of living, has never seen such a thing. Even Fiona lapsed into surprised silence at the sight before her. Jesse hasn’t moved an inch, and, as unsure as they all were, none of them moved to help him find his place.

An hour passes before he turns toward them. “Guys?” he says over his shoulder. “I’m just gonna sit out here until they go away.”

They move silently back into the main body of the house, entertaining themselves with board games and their private concerns. Maddie brings Jesse his dinner outside. The afternoon turns to morning. 

The zombies melt, fall fallow, and sicken, but they never leave.

Jesse creeps back in at two in the morning to find his family sprawled over couches and chairs. With a smirk, he goes in search of blankets to bed down with. In ten minutes, he’d cossetted several of them in several skeins of silky blanket. He thinks about the day’s events as he lies down and feels the turning of the tide. It had been far too close of a call. They wouldn’t ever allow themselves to be so lax again. 

The following morning, the lawn is filled with worshipful, silently milling zombies. A few more have fallen dead, but Jesse makes no move to remove them from the masses. He also doesn’t bother to go back outside. 

“I don’t think they’ll be a problem anymore,” he declares. “Let’s fix what we broke.”

“Why are you in charge?” Maddie asks, but she’s already going about sweeping up the broken glass scattered in front of the window they’d shattered in an act of self-protection.

“Because he can speak to them.” Jesse raises an eyebrow at the idea. “You’re like the zombie whisperer,” Sam says, sounding sort of reverent – as reverent as Sam ever sounded about anything. 

“All I knew was that they’d never leave the four of you alone if I didn’t do what I did.” Jesse shrugs. “So I just went ahead and did it.”

“What a noble gesture,” Fiona mutters. She’d been busy helping Michael salvage wooden scraps to build the ledges back up, her hand ghosting over Sam’s straining back before asking. “Why aren’t you in charge?” she asks Michael.

“Because zombie is a latent form of Spanish,” Michael replies. 

It takes them an entire month to fix the damage, but life resumes and returns to normal in a much shorter amount of time. The number of zombies never increases or decreases, though once the decomposition completed they simply dropped where they lay. Jesse simply needs to appear once a day so to circumvent any further attacks. 

It’s an odd position to be in, but Jesse doesn’t ask for special treatment. “It’s nobody’s fault I’m this way. If all they need is to see me, then I’ll let ‘em take a long look.” Madeline busies herself in the afternoons making him slightly fancier suits, so that the zombies will be properly entertained by the sight of their so-proposed savior. Even while she supported his offering, Madeline expressed a curious reservation in regard to him. 

“What IS he?” Madeline worries over dinner several hours later, staring at Jesse’s expression. His eyes are different, and his gate a little staggered, but he isn’t lurching toward them demanding blood. Small favors, she thinks sarcastically. He continues slicing his pork roast and glaring at Sam. 

“If I knew what was going on,” he says, “I’d fix it. But since I’m stuck like this, maybe we oughta use it to our advantage.” With that, Jesse crosses himself and begin the nightly prayer. 

***

_As I told you before, there are situations you’ll always be woefully unprepared for. But when the clouds pass and tensions ease, you’ll find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings with no way to predict the future. Life, much like spycraft, can be completely unpredictable. You can guess and counter-guess your way to the top of the heap, but you’ll never have medicine for every poison it brings you. If you have the right team beside you and the sense to know when you’re right and when to give leeway to the people you love the most, you can accomplish anything you set your hand to. Even when the duct tape runs out, even when you’re down to your last canister of gasoline, you’ll always have someone by your side to watch out for your best interests._

_March_

It’s Sam who wonders aloud if they might be able to train the zombies as practical helpers around the cabin. “Maybe they can learn how to haul wood,” he suggests. The very idea is shot down in a hurry by his fellow castaways – who wanted to get close enough to try? The dead continue dropping in the woods, fertilizing the ground they had once befouled. Paperwhites and narcissi popp up from the ground, and the sweet scent wafts into the cabin at odd intervals, occasionally mixing with the somewhat salty odor of rotting flesh. 

They keep the area manicured, tending to the blooming plants and raising whatever chickens and rabbits that didn’t end up wayward meals for the stumbling, worshipful horde. Not one zombie threatens them. They are often simply left alone to meander through the days, telling stories and playing games of memory. The libraries sustain them still, through the beginning of spring, and when there is a lack of entertainment they drive out to the freshwater river several and go swimming and fishing in its warm, silver-green confines. 

The spring progresses into the summer, until finally one day the tension breaks with a thunderstorm. Fiona leans against the porch’s support beam, watching the zombies rock in the rain. 

“Hot?” Sam approaches her from behind, his eyes locked on the mass of rotting flesh behind him.

“It’s starting to break,” she mutters, wiping her brow. She lifts her shoulders and rests her head against the back post. “Are you lonely out there bunking with Jesse?”

“He’s never there,” Sam says. “It’s spooky how little the guy sleeps these days. Maybe those ugly SOBs unlocked the key to the fountain of youth.” 

She maneuvers herself about to face Sam, her high heels striking the wooden porch with demanding stride. She pulls close to Sam and boosts herself up against the window ledge. “Come to our room,” Fiona whispers her fingers brushing carefully against his chest. 

Sam is many things: noble, romantic, foolish. He isn’t, however, a raging cheat. “Why the hell do you need me?”

She smiles. “Michael and I are bored, and we both like you. There’s no reason not to be chummy tonight.” 

“But I don’t have any…” 

She bites his neck. “Michael told me you had a vasectomy two years ago. We can play all day without hurting anyone.” 

“I always knew you had a short attention span, but this is the lowest,” he mutters. “Christ, you expect me to believe that the two of you…”

“Yes,” she says quite simply. “I do, because he has, and if you’re perfectly willing we’re going to.” She shrugs and spins away, the perfect sylph. “And if you don’t want to, you could always watch while Jesse and I…” Her voice dies away as Jesse drifts past them blindly, walking toward the door and then moving beyond them to the porch. Fiona starts in surprise, her voice not even coming close to penetrating his conscious mind. “What on earth is he doing?”

Sam moves to shake Jesse’s shoulder, but he doesn’t even react to the older man’s touch. His fingers encircle the railing and grip it with a touch made suddenly quite fierce. Sitting on the stairs, he starts speaking – an odd ramble, guttural, in a language neither human understands, and the creatures which had spent so many long hours massing on their lawn doing nothing, suddenly gained sentience, purpose, as he spoke. Fiona and Sam watch him in confusion for awhile, but it’s Sam who comes to determined life, pushing Fi back into the cabin. “Watch out for Maddie,” he demands. Calculating the distance between himself and the Charger, he decides to pull a full-on Duke and slide down the rails – if he needs to. Fortunately, the group seems too distracted by Jesse’s impassioned, oddly spoken speech. Sam knows with a sudden, clenching finality that there’s nothing he can do for Jesse now.

When Michael comes back from the daily forage, he tries his best to get Jesse’s attention, but once more he drifts away from them, caught up in a mental fog. Tension seems to reign over his every action and motion. Madeline finds a bottle of valium in the medicine cabinet and offers to split it up.

On being rejected, she shrugs, downs two pills and says, “suit yourself.” 

After dinner she droops into a peaceful sleep while Fiona, Sam and Michael trade watches by the shuttered windows. Jesse’s voice is a continuous wave of sound lapping at their ankles, soothing but a monotone, and it is beginning to lull even the most hearty among them to sleep. Michael carries his mother to bed before turning in himself. Her bedroom is well-barricaded, and he’s alert enough to keep her safe and free of any pain that might arrive. He strokes the scar hidden behind her ear. It’s more than his father had ever been able to do for her. 

An hour passes before he leaves the room to relieve Sam, who waits by the window with his rifle cocked. 

Michael considers the best course of action before he makes the first move. Unable to deny the intrigue percolating in his mind, he squeezes Sam’s shoulder.

“Come to our room tonight.”

Surprise reflects in Sam’s expression for just a minute, but he gives a curt nod and leaves Michael to watch Jesse until he couldn’t endure the constant drone of his voice.

Back to his mother’s room he goes, and for a few moments he simply watches Maddie’s shadowed face in the half-darkness, seeing the light spilling in from under the door caress and meld with her features as the night wears on. 

Then Michael turns away from her and points his boots toward Fiona.

***

That night the wind keeps howling, underscoring Jesse’s every guttural, nonsensical word. Halfway past four, Sam does indeed find himself in Michael and Fiona’s room, standing tentatively in the doorway with a strangely cautious expression. 

The two lovers look up and move toward Sam automatically, and Sam takes one look at Fiona’s hungry expression and sees Michael’s confused eyes dance over his face. He licks his lips, crosses the threshold in a single step.

One set of fingers unbutton his shirt. The other – teasingly, wickedly – reach for his fly. 

Many arms wrap around Sam, feeling like an anemone’s kiss. Lips latchd onto this throat and draw him down into the crimson embrace of the sheets. It rocks him, unsettling the world from its axis. 

A much different kind of hunger than the monstrosity that loomed outside capture their lust, their souls. Sam feels his skin prickle as Fiona rides him wildly, desperation and sweat glistening on her skin.

“Don’t wake up Ma,” Michael whispers.

Sam bites Fiona’s shoulder to kill the howl building in his throat.

**** 

None of them sees the figure, shadowed, standing in the doorway. None but Fiona, who smiles and spreads her arms, spreads her thighs, and welcomes him in.

Much later, Jesse’s lips ghost her collarbone. “I have to give them what they want.”

“No.” Her fingers clutch his upper arm. “I don’t want to lose you.”

He sits back on his haunches, shaking his head sadly. “It doesn’t matter what we want anymore.”

“No..” Her nails and fists bite him, raining pain against flesh turning rapidly cold. He sheds his clothing on the way to the front door, leaving Fi to collapse in a pile on the doorstep.

“I just found you,” she whispers, squeezing her eyes shut. 

*** 

Tears awake them. Not their own, but an irregular sobbing coming from the porch.

Startled from their cozy haze, Michael and Sam run toward the window. An enormous blot of blood drips and spreads across the white slats of the porch. They throw open the door to find Fi staring at the crowd before them, her eyes moist.

The zombies are no longer zombies at all, but people covered in blood and crying, bewildered. One of them holds Jesse’s crucifix between their palms and is staring at it with numb surprise.

“What did we do?” they whisper, staring at their bloody hands, their gore-covered lips. “Why did we do it?” The horrified screams and endless chatter fill the air.

Michael’s response is to fire his rifle in the air. “Get off my land,” he growls. 

They stare at him blankly for a minute, so he fires one more warning shot into the floorboards. “GET OFF MY LAND.”

Suddenly, they are a river of humanity, tripping over themselves to get away, splashing through the bog water and trampling down the wild grass until they were nothing but retreating lumps of black on the horizon.

“Where’s Jesse?” Sam wonders, her eyes frantic.

There is no sign of their friend. In fact, the world has gone eerily quiet.

Sam takes a cautious step off the porch and then picks up the blood-caked gold chain from the ground. He squeezes it just once in his fist.

“We’ve gotta go after them,” Michael says to Fiona. “We’ve gotta go save him!”

“Stow your white knight complex for a second, Mikey. For once,” Sam replies peevishly. “Let ‘em take care of themselves.”

Michael bites his tongue. “But they killed our friend…”

“And they’re better for it. Jesse did the nobelest thing I’ve ever heard of – he saved our lives. Saved all of humanity. It’s the best way he could’ve gone out, and I’m not gonna wreck all the memories I have of him by taking away from the best damn sacrifice I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s why he was chanting. He was trying to offer himself up to them,” Fiona realizes suddenly. “How incredible!”

“We’ll never forget him,” Michael says, staring at the bloody space where his friend had sacrificed every last scrap of himself to save the world. Sam crosses himself. Michael bows his head, and they begin the silent prayers they had long ago learned to say over their fallen comrades.

Fiona rests her gun against her inner thigh. The tips of her fingers ghost over her belly thoughtfully before she agreed. “We’ll never forget him.” And so she heads back into the cabin to retrieve Michael’s mother.

***

_In the end, survival is the key. No matter who you’ve lost and what has happened, if you’re alive at the end of a year-long siege and have something to show for it, you’ve beaten them._

_May_

In Miami central, science lives on even as nature threatens to overwhelm the world. One of the panic-stricken, horrified by what they had witnessed, drives themselves numbly to the center of town and throws themself on the mercy of the scientific community.

“I was one of them,” he explains frantically. “I was, and now I’m not – please believe me!”

And so the contagion is isolated, discovered to be biochemically developed within a matter of hours. But there’s only a shoestring of capable physicians left to reverse-engineer a vaccine, a serum, and so the disease will spread on as they struggle. Historians will later whisper that they took to sacrificing the weakest of the lot to engineer a proper vaccine, that they turned former colleagues into jelly to keep him alive, to keep the scientific progress going.

But none of that will matter when they emerge with blood spattered overcoats several months later; they’re proudly toting an antidote, and that’s enough to make them all heroes to the world, to win them Nobel Prizes and eventually re-open Miami to construction, resettlement and rebuilding. The relief will be palpable, with no time or airplay to be given to cynics.

After all, they were running out of big, juicy scientific minds to feed the beast.

Reports surface later of a child born sometime after the reconstruction begins, to a Michael Westen and a Fiona Glenanne (the Westen’s companion, Samuel Axe, is not the child’s biological father but soon attains partial legal custody of the child). A strapping young boy, tiny Bobby is said to have a sharp, intuitive way of understanding the world. There’s something eerie – even creepy, though his Uncle Sam will never tell him so to his face – about his presence.

At a very early age, he learns how to talk to animals.

Dead ones.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> The preceding story was a work of fanfiction using characters from **Burn Notice**. The characters are not my intellectual property but belong to Matt Nix and the USA Network. No money was made from the publication of this work, as it is a fan creation within the bounds of Creative Commons.


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